Archive for August, 2014

Boise State University in Idaho has announced the formation of the new Institute for STEM and Diversity Initiatives. One goal of the new institute is to increase the quality, quantity, and diversity of students graduating in STEM fields.

The posters showed photographs of York students in the 1960s. All of the students in the photographs are white. A more recent photo showing a diverse group of students contained the caption, “Soon Whites will be the minority.”

The first beneficiary of the grant program is Dionne M. Benjamin, a member of the class of 2000. She received a grant that helped her offset the cost of an illustrator for the first of her series of children’s books.

The project is the idea of Kwame Dawes, a Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. The libraries, scheduled to open in September are located in Gambia, Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda.

Bernard Lafayette Jr., the Distinguished Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, is being honored for his book about his time as leader of the Selma, Alabama, voting rights protests.

This year 21 Black women were offered bids to join sororities at the University of Alabama. But Black women were just 1 percent of all new sororities members. The process was further tainted by a sorority member’s posting of a photograph with a racist caption.

According to the 2014 scores on the ACT college entrance examination, only one in 20 Black students were rated college-ready in all four areas: English, reading, mathematics and science. Whites were nearly seven times as likely as Blacks to be college ready in all four areas.

A new report from the Council on Graduate Schools shows that the number of foreign applicants to U.S. graduate schools in 2014 from Africa increased by 9 percent from a year ago. Black acceptances were up 3 percent.

President Burse came to football practice to announce that he would support senior football player Deshon Floyd’s effort to raise money for an internship in New Zealand. President Burse said he would cover the remaining expenses.

The report from the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago finds that 54.5 percent of Black youth report being harassed by the police. This is nearly double the rate for youth from other racial and ethnic groups.

Lawrence Sanders Jr. teaches internal medicine, business principles, and patient safety/quality improvement at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. He earned his medical degree at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

The study found that 10 percent of young inner-city children had food allergies. Peanut allergies were the most common, followed by eggs, and milk. Nationwide about 3 percent of all adults and 6 percent of young children have food allergies.

Dr. Jones began his career at Penn State in 1980 as a residence hall coordinator. After a one-year stint as acting provost at Loch Haven University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Jones returned to Penn State in 1997 and a year later was named vice provost for educational equity.

Grambling State University in Louisiana had planned to name its next president in October. But a delay in securing the services of an executive search firm has now pushed the timetable for the announcement of a new president to the spring of 2015.

The four honorees are Lynden A. Archer of Cornell University in New York, Gary L. LeRoy of Wright State University in Detroit, Jada Bussey-Jones of Emory University in Atlanta, and Derek Wilson of Prairie View A&M University in Texas.

The partnership will include scholarships, internship opportunities, in-kind contributions from Walmart to the university and job readiness workshops led by Walmart professionals in fields such as logistics, law, and transportation management.

Underrepresented minorities made up 5.2 percent of the applicant pool for graduate programs at Princeton University. There were 196 African Americans in the applicant pool, making up 1.8 percent of all applicants.

Jefferson P. Rogers was an educator, pastor, civil rights leader, and the former director of the Center for Community Change. He served on the faculty at Florida Memorial University and established the Howard Thurman Distinguished Lecture Series in conjunction with Stetson University.

The Sierra Club has announced the establishment of a new award that will honor an individual or a group that has done outstanding work in the area of environmental justice. The award will be named after Dr. Robert Bullard, one of the founders of the environmental justice movement.

The project, by Coastal Carolina University’s Athenaeum Press, is the culmination of a decade of research collecting oral histories, documents, photographs, and other mementos of African American veterans.

The citation for the award given to Beverly Daniel Tatum said that “you have engaged the very difficult subject of race relations in the United States, and the impact of such an environment on identity development for African Americans.”

Saint Augustine’s University in Raleigh, North Carolina, saw tuition revenue drop by $3 million during the last academic year. It has taken several steps to deal with the loss in revenue including the recent decision not to rehire 75 adjunct faculty members for the new academic year.